Kundeeffortscore

Kundeeffortscore is a customer experience metric used to quantify the ease with which a customer can complete an intended action with a business, such as resolving a service issue, returning a product, or making a purchase. The score centers on perceived effort rather than satisfaction and is used to identify friction in the customer journey and to gauge its impact on loyalty and future behavior.

Measurement and interpretation typically rely on a post-interaction survey with a single question such as, "How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?" Responses are collected on a Likert scale, commonly five or seven points, ranging from very low to very high effort. Some implementations invert the scale so that higher numbers indicate lower effort. The resulting Kundeeffortscore is usually reported as an average or median, and can be analyzed by channel, issue type, or customer segment to locate friction points.

Applications of kundeeffortscore include process optimization, service design, onboarding, self-service improvements, and channel strategy. It is often used in combination with other metrics such as customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS) because, while CSAT and NPS measure satisfaction and loyalty, Kundeeffortscore specifically targets the ease of the customer experience and its correlation with long-term loyalty.

History and context note that the underlying concept—customer effort as a predictor of loyalty—originated in research conducted by organizations such as the Corporate Executive Board (now part of Gartner) in the early 2010s. In German-speaking contexts, the term kundeeffortscore may be used to refer to this same metric. Limitations include cultural differences in how effort is perceived and the simplicity of a single-item measure, which may not capture all friction factors.